12 tips for Christmas email marketing

7 minute read

I know what you’re thinking, Christmas seems a long way off yet. But if you’re planning on sending out some festive email marketing campaigns this year, you’ll definitely want to start thinking about it now. Here are some top tips to help make your email marketing a success this Christmas.

1- Analyse last year’s email campaigns

To give you an idea of where you should start with this year’s campaigns, go back to emails you sent last year and see how they performed. What tactics yielded the best open and clickthrough rates? Which products or services were most popular with your subscribers? The Analyse section of your Sign-Up.to account can provide a complete history of your campaigns along with many useful statistics on their performance.

2- Competitors

If you are struggling for inspiration, have a look at what your competitors are doing this Christmas. Sign up to mailing lists, visit websites, see what offers other businesses in your field are running. How does their approach compare to your own?

3- Subject lines

It is common knowledge that the festive season is a competitive time for email marketers. Your subscribers inboxes will be full of offers and updates and you will have to be prepared to compete for attention. Subject line is a key factor in whether a recipient will even open your email, so make it punchy, unique and intriguing enough to get those opens.

4- Design

So you’ve got your subscribers’ attention with your subject line, now what? Make sure that when they open your email it looks fantastic. There are a selection of free festive email templates ready and available for use in your Sign-Up.to account and if none of those are for you, try customising one of our standard templates.

5- Email content

As you know, Christmas is a busy time for the inbox. You’ve got as far as getting your subscribers to look at your email which is excellent, but now make sure you’ve got some good stuff to tell them. Make your offers enticing and your updates exciting. Keep links obvious and relevant, with strategic use of images to keep the content interesting and varied. Also try personalising your email to make it a little more friendly and improve your relationships with your readers.

6- Campaign length

A vital thing to consider when putting together a campaign is its length. Don’t make your email too long or wordy as there is a strong possibility that recipients will simply not read it all! If you have a lot to say on a topic, provide an appealing summary or caption along with a link to where people can read more if they want to.

7- Social networking

If your business does not have a Facebook page or a Twitter account then it is missing out on some serious public exposure. Utilising social networking is becoming more and more vital in this age of digital marketing and you don’t want to miss out! Through the Sign-Up.to system, your campaign can be tweeted automatically alongside your email campaign send and the ability to also share it on Facebook is coming soon.

8- Don’t bombard your subscribers

It is tempting to send out tons of campaigns at this time of year in order to maximise the exposure your company receives. Do this however and you run the risk of irritating your subscribers to the point where they no longer want to hear from you at all, and unsubscribe. This is bad news, so be strategic with your campaign schedule, not too much, but not too little either.

9- Remind subscribers why you are contacting them

If you have not been in contact with your subscribers for a while, they may have forgotten who you are and that they opted in to hear from you. It can be a good idea to include in your campaign a brief explanation of where you obtained their contact details or a reminder of any other brand names you trade under.

10- Split testing

This feature is available in Sign-Up.to’s ‘Up & Running’ and ‘Seasoned Pro’ accounts. Split testing allows you to carry out A/B testing on your campaigns to directly compare techniques for maximising open and click through rates. Useful areas to test are different subject lines, link placements or even special offers. Read more about how to perform a split test here.

11- Attention to detail

In my opinion there’s nothing worse than receiving an email with a spelling mistake, missing word, grammatical error, broken link or missing image. It looks sloppy and doesn’t reflect well on your company. Take the time to check your campaign and then get someone else to check it as well. A few minutes spent before your send can eliminate embarrassing mistakes.

12- Plain text

To aid deliverability, get into the habit of setting plain text versions of your campaigns. In the eyes of spam filters it will make your campaign a safer prospect and also anyone who cannot view HTML emails will receive the plain text version instead. In an age where people often view emails on mobile devices, setting a plain text version of a campaign is more important than ever.

Hopefully these tips will get you off to great start with your Christmas email marketing, however be sure to allow yourself enough time to create and refine your campaigns to their best. We recommend testing thoroughly across a variety of email clients to ensure deliverability and design success.

Do you have any additional tips or feedback you’d like to share with us? Please leave a comment below!